alt.hn

2/6/2026 at 11:58:53 PM

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

 https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/

by gfortaine

2/7/2026 at 9:25:12 AM

I need to give this a try, but nowadays I am reluctant to fire up Gemini CLI due to its insane appetite for tokens.

It doesnt matter if your LLM in/out tokens are a bit cheaper than competitors when you use 3x of them on every prompt. Maybe Google should focus on addressing that first?

by throwa356262

2/7/2026 at 4:48:12 AM

Why do people have to make this stuff so complicated? An API that requires a key and enabling an MCP server and configuring your client to fetch markdown files on the fly? There's documentation on how to set things up to be able to get the documentation? Why not just a tar with all the docs? How big are they? A couple MB? Agents are really good at using grep on text files. So is my text editor.

Want it to be easy to update? Make it a git repo with all the docs. My agent already knows to always do a git fetch before interacting with a repo in a new session. Or you can fetch on a timer. Whatever.

I haven't yet figured out the point of this MCP stuff. Codex seems to have innate knowledge of how to curl jira and confluence and gitlab and prometheus and SQL databases and more. All you need to configure is a .netrc file and put the hostname in AGENTS.md. Are MCP tools even composable? Like can the model pipe the response to grep or jq or another MCP call without it entering/wasting context? Or is a normal CRUD API strictly more powerful and easier to use?

by ndriscoll

2/7/2026 at 6:51:32 AM

The point of MCP is discoverability. A crud app is better, except you have to waste context telling your LLM a bunch of details. With MCP you only put into it's context what the circumstances are where it applies, and it can just invoke it. You could write a bunch of little wrapper scripts around each api you want to use and have basically reinvented MCP for yourself.

by tvink

2/7/2026 at 8:33:12 AM

Most MCPs I've seen could be:

1. A cli script or small collection of scripts

2. A very short markdown file explaining how it works and when to use it.

3. Optionally, some other reference markdown files

Context use is tiny, nearly everything is loaded on demand.

And as I'm writing this, I realize it's exactly what skills are.

Can anyone give an example of something that this wouldn't work for, and which would require MCP instead?

by esperent

2/7/2026 at 7:23:20 AM

I tried using the Microsoft azure devops MCP and it immediately filled up 160k of my context window with what I can only assume was listing out an absurd number of projects. Now I just instruct it to make direct API calls for the specific resources, I don’t know maybe I’m doing something wrong in Cursor, or maybe Microsoft is just cranking out garbage (possible), but to get that context down I had to uncheck all the myriad features that MCP supplies.

by wincy

2/7/2026 at 6:26:26 AM

> Why not just a tar with all the docs? How big are they? A couple MB?

  fabien@debian2080ti:~$ du -sh /usr/share/man/ #all lang
  52M     /usr/share/man/
Yep... in fact there are already a lot of tooling for that, e.g. man obviously but also apropos.

by utopiah

2/7/2026 at 6:08:29 AM

How do you manage auth for services that use OAuth?

I’ve been wrapping the agent’s curl calls in a small cli that handles the auth but I’m wondering if other people have come up with something lighter/more portable.

by superturkey650

2/7/2026 at 5:44:35 AM

> Why do people have to make this stuff so complicated?

Job security.

by latchkey

2/7/2026 at 6:08:47 AM

So an mcp server just for google specific public docs? Aren't there a dozen of them like Context7 (https://context7.com/) that already do this?

by lemonish97

2/7/2026 at 8:10:20 AM

There’s something almost nostalgic about it: cutting-edge technology wrapped in layers of bureaucracy that feel lovingly inherited from another era.

by pulkas

2/7/2026 at 3:29:43 AM

This must be what gwern meant when he said to write for AI.

by er4hn

2/7/2026 at 5:13:32 AM

I can relate to this. Gemini 3 doesn’t know a thing about iOS 26 or Liquid Glass. It constantly assumes this is some custom view that I want it to develop and ends up building something out the previous gen apis like ultrathinmaterial.

by inshard